May 21, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
I’m basing this minireview on three game sessions.
Step 1: Insert Crackdown disc. Step 2: Choose “Play Halo 3 Beta” Step 3: Watch pretty opening screen. Enter multiplayer lobby. Step 4: Start matchmaking process. Step 5: Wait 15 minutes while the game tries, and fails, to find a match. Step 6: Give up and go do something interesting.
Color me unimpressed.
May 18, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Food and Drink
Fish is not hard to cook. We are just trained to think it is. Early on in my cooking “career” (graduate school) we picked up a large cookbook about fish that meticulously broke down multiple techniques with several examples of each and hints about which kind of fish which technique was suited for. I remember bringing the odd piece of fish home, thumbing through the book to try and figure out what to do and then throwing up my hands when I couldn’t find the right set of instructions out of the right list.
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May 17, 2007 · peterb · 7 minute read
Games
And so with the release of Episode 6: Bright Side of the Moon, Season 1 of Sam and Max has come to an end.
So, how did they do? Pretty damn good. Let’s talk about what this means for the future of adventure games.
[](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/05/silhouettes-1600x1200.jpg “Silhouettes” )
Sam and Max
I don’t want to turn this into a blow by blow review of the games in the series. There were high points, a few puzzles that were really clever, a few others that were really stupid.
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May 15, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
I was at the library the other day and realized that I still hadn’t seen The Bourne Identity. So I said to myself “Hey, I’ll just pick up the book instead.” Perusing the shelf of Robert Ludlum titles, I realized they all had these very stilted, cold war, nouny sort of names. The Osterman Weekend. The Holcroft Covenant, The Chancellor Manuscript.
So I wrote a little script to autogenerate Ludlum titles for me, just in case I should ever need to ghost write a book for his kid.
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May 14, 2007 · psu · 8 minute read
Photo
When I bought my first SLR film camera, I didn’t give much thought to bags. I needed a small bag to fit the body and two lenses that I had bought, so I went to the store and picked out the smallest Domke (the F-5) which seemed to be big enough. It could fit the camera ready to shoot and the extra lens, and it wasn’t that big. I could get the camera in and out without putting the bag down.
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May 11, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
Early this week, Tea Leaves' industrious panel of dedicated tasters converged on Mad Mex in Oakland to try a variety of wonderful tequilas. I’ll be writing about that in detail, in the next few weeks.
In addition to discovering some new favorite tequilas, I got a peek at the best hand-held lime juicer I’ve ever seen. Half of a lemon or lime goes in, you give it a quick squeeze, and the juice just flies out in under a second.
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May 9, 2007 · psu · 4 minute read
Games
I have a weakness for the NBA Street games. I like them because they do not try to simulate basketball, rather, they let you play a type of basketball that is completely ludicrous and unhealthy. I think the series peaked with NBA Street 2, which is still fun to play even today. Hoping to recapture some of that magic, I picked up a used copy of NBA Street: Homecourt at the Exchange the other day to see if it would make it through the Ebay Review System.
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May 8, 2007 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Wine is a funny business. There are plenty of tangible resources that go into producing the bottle of wine that lands on your kitchen table: land, grapes, yeast, glass, and so on. And there are plenty of intangibles that go into making a good wine: knowledge, patience, and most importantly, process. But many people (or at least, many Americans) who buy wine are really trying to buy something else: romance.
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May 7, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Photo
Having buried myself in the Strobist for the last couple of weeks, I came up for air over the weekend and reflected on what I had learned. First, I learned that buying a lightstand and umbrella can be a bit stressful and complicated. But that’s not important or interesting. What is interesting to me is to compare the techniques at the Strobist with those in the excellent [Bob Krist lighting book](http://www.
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May 5, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
are wine reviewers. Imagine if game reviewers wrote game reviews the way that thesaurus addled hack Robert Parker reviews wine:
Shadow of the Colossus has a certain je ne sais quoi in its coding, a whiff of east-coast style that reveals that this Japanese game’s native terroir is really Bell Labs. The structure is simple, yet baroque, not unlike the original sed, or awk. Redolent of Gosling Emacs and perhaps even a note of Crowther Adventure, the color palette is subdued, yet puckish.
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May 3, 2007 · psu · 1 minute read
Culture
Dear NPR:
It’s 18 months before the election. Only a true mental cripple would actually have more than a microscopic level of interest in what is going on in the Presidential “race”. And yet you find it necessary to waste literally hours of your expensive broadcast time “covering” this story which does not exist yet, analyzing events that have not happened, and “predicting” results that, given your complete lack of meaningful data, have no possible link to any future reality.
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May 1, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
I mentioned it as a one-off joke in an earlier article: “Oh, yes, there’s this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas – you really should go, dahling!”
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t kidding. That bar really exists. You should go there and drink sweet vermouth. But if you can’t go there, you should drink sweet vermouth anyway.
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Apr 30, 2007 · psu · 7 minute read
Photo
This week I found the first photographic web site to pique my interest in a long time. For a while now I had been ignoring most of the photographic web because there just wasn’t any content at an appropriate level of maturity. What I mean by that is that most sites are either just a big shopping catalog or a collection of articles providing shallow tutorials on various subjects like how best to put the $5000 digital camera you just bought on a tripod.
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Apr 24, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Web
Due to circumstances beyond our control, updates will be slow this week.
Coming soon: The Great Tequila Tasting. 4X: Reach for the Stars! And more. See you soon.
Apr 18, 2007 · psu · 7 minute read
Photo
I have a drawer in my house. I call it my “photo junk” drawer. Eight or nine years ago, it started out as an empty hanging file drawer where I started to file away the PrintFile slide storage pages that I had been collecting since buying my first real camera. There are a few folders of slides in the drawer, but it is now mostly overrun with small piles of print envelopes and small accessories that I had no use for.
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Apr 17, 2007 · peterb · 4 minute read
Games
I wrote a review in this month’s issue of PTD magazine that I’m sure is going to garner me much hate mail. I won’t reiterate the entire thing here, but to make a long story short, I panned Crackdown, a game where your objective, as a cop, is to murder as many immigrants as possible. I panned it specifically because of the game’s absolutely vile morals, and more specifically its vile politics.
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Apr 16, 2007 · psu · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
For various reasons, we hadn’t been getting to the Strip as much as we used to. Maybe it was some stress at work. Maybe it was the worse than normal patented Pittsburgh early spring freeze. Maybe it was that when we did go things weren’t really the same. But the last two Saturdays, we finally made it down there again became reacquainted with some old friends.
The main motivation for our trip last week was to check out the Penn Avenue Fish Company.
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Apr 12, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
Here are two games to play in your web browser and destroy your productivity:
Desktop Tower Defense. Action! Guns! Squirt Towers! Recommended by Jeremy Zawodny.
MathsNet Interactive Geometry. Three dimensional puzzles! Tip: Puzzle #1 is the hardest one by a mile. Recommended as retaliation for the earlier link by fpereira.
Go play them! Just don’t blame me when you get fired.
Apr 11, 2007 · psu · 8 minute read
Photo
Tonight a lesson in dork shopping. I bought a new Nikon D200 digital SLR last month. We are taking our first vacation in a while, and it seemed like a good excuse to upgrade the picture taking machine since you always take a lot of pictures on trips. After a lot of angst over whether the more expensive body was worth it (the D80 is not much of a downgrade feature-wise) I finally decided to spring for it.
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Apr 10, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute read
Computers
It’s not just [the free software song](http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why- cooperation-with-rms-is-impossible.mp3), but that [every interaction with the man is like playing Simon Says with a malicious 6 year old](http://web.archive .org/web/20001109151800/http://crystal.linuxgames.com/rms.html).
I remember once, many years ago, a friend of mine logged in to RMS’s account to show me some funny things (RMS used to be anti-password, and so when they forced him to use a password, he chose an easy one and told everyone about it, so I don’t think he’d view this as illicit).
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Apr 9, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Culture
I used to love my receiver. It gave me a sense of dork pride to know that sure, I had suffered great pains to get everything hooked up, but my reward was a rich stereo sound experience that the other losers in the audience were missing. No TV sound for me. Like most things though, as I got older, the inconvenience of dealing with the machine started to overtake the enjoyment of the result.
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Apr 6, 2007 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
I’m an adult who, on occasion, enjoys drinking in moderation. Since I live in Pennsylvania I am forced to purchase liquor through what is charitably described as the very worst state-owned liquor monopoly in the entire universe.
I’ve written about this in detail before: the painfully unhelpful staff at many stores, and that the system seems more interested in punishing you for wanting to buy liquor than in trying to sell it.
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Apr 5, 2007 · psu · 5 minute read
Games
God of War 2 is God of War turned up to 11.
That’s pretty much all you need to know. If you liked the first game you will like the second. If, like my wife, you thought the first game was juvenile and offensive, you will not think the second game is any different. Me, I liked the first game, but I also thought it was juvenile and offensive. I bought God of War 2 anyway because I was in the mood to run around in some huge levels and beat the crap out of a lot of faceless monsters.
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Apr 4, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
“Keith Richards snorted his father? Who would imagine he’d be that crazy?”
The answer, of course, is “Dave Sim”, whose model of Keith was apparently too conservative (click the image to enlarge for readability):
[](http:// tleaves.com/weblog/images/articles/IMG_6560.jpg)
See also here.
Apr 3, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
Cachaça, a foul-tasting sugarcane based spirit, may be the best reason yet to go to war with Brazil. I have had homemade moonshine made from cat barf that did less damage to my psyche (and liver).
Apr 3, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute read
Games
Those of you who have been following my reviews know of my infatuation with Telltale’s Sam and Max adventure games. The thrilling thing to me about these games is that they have been consistently funny and playable games.
The fourth episode of their “episodic series”, Abe Lincoln Must Die! has been released. It’s strongly written. It has clever writing, brilliant situations, and is funny enough that it had me, quite literally, crying tears of laughter.
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Apr 2, 2007 · psu · 10 minute read
Photo
The subject of exposure in photography is filled with confusion. On the one hand, automatic exposure systems have largely freed the general public from ever thinking about the problem except under dire circumstances. On the other hand, beginning photographers who aspire to become serious workers in the medium are usually overly obsessed with the technical aspects of “correct” exposure. Even the idea of correct exposure is hard to pin down. You could argue that you can’t know the correct exposure for a picture without knowing what the subject is.
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Mar 27, 2007 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
For several years now I’ve had issues with the Meyersdale Maple Festival. Namely, I always intend to go but then always forget. Sometime in June I’ll ask my friends “Hey, when’s the maple festival? I want to meet the Maple Queen.” and they shout “March!" and I say “Oh, oops, maybe next year.”
This year, the 60th year of the festival, I finally remembered to go. And I met the Maple Queen.
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Mar 26, 2007 · psu · 5 minute read
Culture
There was a break in the bleak weather and a small break in the workload at work, so we spent the weekend doing weekend things instead of surfing the web and finding some dork topic to spout off on. Instead, I have some short thoughts on things that are not worth a whole article.
Yupcakes Recently, Pittsburgh has joined a socioeconomic and culinary trend that has been sweeping through the neighborhoods of the intellectually less gifted.
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Mar 23, 2007 · peterb · 9 minute read
Computers
My internet provider of choice (and former employer) Telerama has been having a few problems lately. This has engendered some morbid conversations, Irish wake-style, among some folks about whether and when the business will completely give up the ghost.
Regardless of what happens to Telerama – and I hope it’s around for a long time, and regains a solid financial footing – I think it brings some lessons that are of interest to anyone who wants to run a small business.
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Mar 22, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
Since our office moved closer to Oakland, Craig Street is the most convenient place to get a bite to eat or a cup of coffee. This is somewhat tragic, since Craig Street has always been covered with a miasma that makes food served in the area merely adequate. The best example of this is the Coffee Situation.
Coffee on Craig St. is an unmitigated disaster. There’s Kiva Han, which for all its hip aura sells coffee so unremittingly and gruellingly terrible that I’ve actually poured it out after one sip.
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Mar 20, 2007 · psu · 7 minute read
Games
For the last two months or so, I’ve been in the enviable position of not having to think about games. I’ve had a “one game” that I can just leave in the machine and fire up every time the urge hits. I hear that this is one of the reasons people are so happy about World of Warcraft.
Sadly, all good things must reach the final Boss. And thus my run through Final Fantasy XII finally came to an end.
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Mar 20, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
One bit of fallout from the Wii “Everybody Votes!” channel is that you’ll find yourself going along through your work day when suddenly you’re overcome with the inability to comprehend: who the hell are all these people who aren’t mad when they get stood up on dates?
Or the people who don’t brush their teeth right before going to bed. You people sicken me.
Mar 19, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Games
This weekend a story with horrifying implications came over the airwaves of the Internet Gaming Forums. This story is of such gravity and importance that I decided to delay my usual Monday morning semi-philosophical wanky gaming article for a day and inform you, our dear reader, of its existence so you can gird yourself for the impending doom to come.
So, without further delay, here is the terrible news: Nintendo’s online service will continue to require separate friend codes for every different game.
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Mar 15, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Web
Because I have the plague.
I blame psu.
Mar 14, 2007 · psu · 3 minute read
Culture
To my way of thinking, every major genre of music has its quintessential forms. There is the three minute pop song sung by a group of three or four young freaks with long hair. There is the large scale Classical/Romantic Symphony. And in Jazz, there is the piano trio or quartet. With all due respect to the other instrumentalists, there is something about the piano trio that connects with the part of my brain that enjoys Jazz and just makes it tingle in a particular way that other records don’t.
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Mar 13, 2007 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Travelling to Europe ruined me in several ways. One, of course, is that I’m compelled to constantly demonstrate what an insufferable poseur I am by placedropping (“Oh, yes, there’s this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas — you really should go, dahling…"). The other is that I can’t enjoy a meal at a restaurant any more, because I can’t stand being interrupted while I eat.
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Mar 12, 2007 · psu · 4 minute read
Games
We have mentioned on occasion that the main reason that the Xbox 360 exists is to deliver the Xbox Live service to your TV. There is something in Xbox Live for everyone. For people who care to play games with others on the Internet, something that I don’t really understand anymore, the friend tracking and online matchmaking in Xbox Live puts all other such services to shame. For people who want to not have to buy the next Ubisoft shooter to find out that it’s crap, the Live service provides downloadable demos and other content that make this easy.
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Mar 12, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
Me: “Hey, Nat, do you know what this ‘Azureus magnet link’ thing is?”
Nat: “Oh, I think of that as ‘That thing that when I click on it, doesn’t work.”
Me: “Hey, me too.”
Mar 8, 2007 · psu · 5 minute read
Games
I love strategy games. At least that’s what I tell myself. One of the first games I was ever seriously addicted to was this FORTRAN monstrosity called EMPIRE that ran on a VT100 terminal on your neighborhood Vax in the late 70s. I remember wasting away many afternoons in the terminal room conquering the world with my armies and boats and aircraft. This game was classic turn-based strategy. You give orders to your dozens of units.
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Mar 7, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
The latest edition of PTD is out! In this month’s free digest you’ll find my review of one of the most revered games of all time, X-Com: UFO Defense, a review of indie entry Arctic Stud Poker Run. You’ll also find the record of how I utterly dominated Lorien at Sid Meier’s Railroads!, and an editorial in which I urge game designers to avoid 3D just for the sake of 3D (I’m not holding my breath on that one).
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Mar 6, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Photo
When you live in a place for a while, your mental map of that place starts getting annotations. Specifically, I find that I start coming up with names for places that are better than their actual names. On Fifth Avenue, across the street from WQED, is a church; its given, wrong, name is “Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church.”
I used to walk past this building every day on the way to class.
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Mar 5, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Culture
The decline and fall of civil society is not the sort of thing that will be immediately obvious to someone observing the process on a day to day basis. It happens in a series of small steps, none of which seem all that fatal on their own. In these “new media” days, one of these small steps is the slow decay of the American Newspaper in the face of new forms of information delivery that cater to those with the attention span of a small house fly.
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Mar 2, 2007 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
…because my ancient laptop, through an unfortunate misadventure involving a Senegalese circus troupe, now has a cracked LCD.
My plan is to spend the rest of the weekend obsessing over whether I should try and fix this thing myself, or just give up and buy a new machine.
Feb 28, 2007 · psu · 10 minute read
Photo
A few years back one of the first things I wrote and “published” online was a thought piece on the state of digital cameras at the time. I had just started using the things heavily, and being pegged as a photo dork, people kept asking me for shopping advice. Recently I rolled the page out to my dad when he asked me some questions and it occured to me that in these modern times of short product cycles one must constantly update and reorganize this sort of thing.
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Feb 27, 2007 · peterb · 6 minute read
Games
This is the fourth in a series of articles about 4X space games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.
Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II is a great game. I can’t stand it.
It appeals to a lot of players, has simple game mechanics, an acceptable UI, and a very high degree of polish. There are many people whose opinions I respect who enjoy it immensely, and you might be one of them.
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Feb 26, 2007 · psu · 6 minute read
Games
Back in the ancient times (you know, 2001), there was an entertainment company that owned the video game universe. Their lock was so tight that even people who were not originally impressed with the technical prowess of their hardware or the aesthetics of their games were still compelled through sheer force of will to buy the system.
This is a story about how a company can own the universe and give it away.
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Feb 21, 2007 · peterb · 7 minute read
Games
This is the third in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.
Perhaps the most well-known of the early era 4X games was Master of Orion. Master of Orion was developed by Simtex, who engendered a cult following with their overrated game Master of Magic. Orion was published by Microprose in 1993. This meant that it had real marketing muscle–Microprose was one of the giants in its day.
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Feb 20, 2007 · peterb · 6 minute read
Games
This is the second in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction, here.
“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s a principle that, in games, is more honored in the breach than in the observance. I’ve written before about how user interface is critical to a game’s playability. But beyond UI is a principle that many developers don’t seem to be able to grasp:
Have me make decisions about things that are important.
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Feb 19, 2007 · psu · 3 minute read
Games
Pete used his Gamefly account to get me a copy of F.E.A.R. for the 360. This is a shooter of relatively high reputation, mostly on the strength of its special rendering effects and yet another implementation of “bullet time” slow-motion massacre technology.
Unfortunately, I am not feeling very motivated to continue with the game after my first impression. I know this is shallow of me, but I have a lot of games and little time, so if a game is not good immediately, there is little point in going on.
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